It’s a rainy day in Basel, so we are taking in the art of the city before going on the obligatory shopping spree. A few things converge to make a mid-sized Swiss city like Basel punch so far above its weight in the art world. There are the historical roots of the city as Basel’s art collection dates back to 1661. The Amerbach Cabinet, bought by the city, is considered the world’s oldest continuously public art collection. That gave the city an unusually long head start on institutional art culture, well before most European “art capitals” had public museums at all. Basel also has long been a banking and pharmaceutical hub (Novartis, Roche are headquartered there), which means generations of private wealth flowing into serious art collecting and museum funding. The Fondation Beyeler (which we drove past…it wasn’t open yet) is a direct product of this, built by an art-dealer couple’s private collection. Since 1970, the Art Basel fair has grown into the most important commercial art fair in the world, now with sister editions in Miami, Hong Kong, and Paris. It draws the entire global art trade of galleries, collectors and curators into the city every June, which reinforces Basel’s centrality in a self-perpetuating way. For its size, Basel has an outsized concentration of major museums: Kunstmuseum Basel (which we toured, compliments of our SwissRail Pass), Fondation Beyeler, Tinguely Museum, Schaulager, Kunsthalle Basel, plus a strong gallery scene year-round, not just during the fair. Sitting where Switzerland, France, and Germany meet gives Basel a natural role as a cultural crossroads, easy to reach from Zurich, Paris, and Frankfurt alike. The net effect is that money, history, and a marquee event have all reinforced each other over the decades.
It all makes me wonder why man creates art. Of course, there’s no single answer, but a few threads run through most explanations people have offered over the centuries. Art lets us externalize inner experience like emotion, perception and ideas, all of which often resist plain language. It’s a way of saying “this is what it’s like to be me, seeing this” and having someone else recognize it. It’s also a way of making sense of mortality and time. A lot of art is an attempt to leave something behind, to freeze a moment or a feeling against the fact that everything else decays. Cave paintings, portraits and elegies can all be seen as a hedge against being forgotten. Art imposes pattern, rhythm, and composition on a world that doesn’t hand those to us for free. There’s real pleasure in that in both making it and perceiving it. Art is one of the few things that reliably transmits an internal state from one mind to another across distance and time. You can feel something a person felt centuries ago just by encountering what they made. Some argue art-making is a byproduct of traits selected for other reasons like pattern recognition, social signaling (skill or status display), or play. Others see it as a genuine adaptation: it builds group cohesion, transmits culture, trains the mind. Of course the simplest answer is that art is about making things that are satisfying in themselves. Skill-building, problem-solving within self-imposed constraints are also involved as art scratches the same itch as any crafts, based on its own sake rather than pure utility.
These days, more art is being created than ever, by almost any measure of raw volume…by an enormous margin. Between digital photography, phones, social media, and now generative AI, humans (and now AI systems) produce more images, music, and text in a day than existed in most of pre-20th-century history combined. Billions of photos are taken daily; AI image generators alone produce hundreds of millions of images a day. But that raises the real question of whether it’s real art, or just content. A lot of people would argue that volume has scaled while other things like craft, scarcity and cultural weight hasn’t kept pace. A painting that took a master six months to complete and a stock photo generated in six seconds (or less if you use AI) aren’t obviously the same category of thing, even if both get filed under “images.” There are more art schools, more working artists, more galleries than in any prior era. But it all competes for attention against an incomprehensibly larger media environment, which may make each individual work register less. Cultural centrality is a separate question from volume. Art arguably occupied a more central social role in eras when it was one of few available media. That was pre-photography portraiture, pre-recorded music. Today art is one voice in a much louder room, even as more of it is made.Whether more meaningful art is being made, art with staying power, the kind that ends up in a Kunstmuseum in 200 years, is a much harder and more contestable claim, and probably won’t be answerable for decades, since we don’t yet know what of today’s flood will last…or even if places like the Kunstmuseum will exist.
But as it says on the wall of the museum…size matters. Creating a large work of art is no small feat. An artist’s studio must, first of all, be spacious enough. The work may not fit on an easel or once completed, be able to pass through the studio door. Up until the 19th century, the mere acquisition of a canvas beyond standard dimensions could be a challenge. Yet apparently, art sometimes demands a certain size. There are thirty imposing works from the Kunstmuseum’s collection on view there that provide insight into some of the manifold motivations for producing large format artworks. Expansive and ambitious, they are “great” in several senses of the word. Maybe scale will be a defining element of what we consider art in the future, with stuff that fits in our phones being defined as content.
From the museum we wander down yet another Medieval street to the Basel Muenster or central cathedral with its rose sandstone exterior. This adds to my argument of art = scale. Cathedrals like this were built to glorify God and manifest heaven on earth with everything else following from that core motive, but a few concrete forces pushed it into the specific, wildly costly form we associate with a “grand cathedral”. Medieval Christians believed light itself was a manifestation of the divine. Gothic architecture’s whole engineering project like flying buttresses, ribbed vaults, and thinner walls existed to let in more stained-glass light and push the building higher, literally reaching toward heaven. The physical extremity of the buildings was the point of it all, not just a side effect. Cathedrals were also status symbols. Cities and bishoprics competed with each other with a taller spire or a bigger nave. It came with a statement of a city’s wealth, piety, and power relative to its rivals. They put the Church’s wealth and organizing power on display. The medieval Church was the single most powerful and well-resourced institution in Europe and it could mobilize labor, land, and money across generations in a way almost no secular power could, which is part of why these projects took 100–300 years to complete and nobody blinked at that timeline. Many cathedrals were built specifically to house relics and accommodate mass pilgrimage traffic so the scale wasn’t just symbolic, it was functional, designed to move and awe huge crowds of visitors. Stained glass, sculpture, and portal carvings told Bible stories visually. The cathedral itself was a catechism in stone and glass for a population that mostly couldn’t read. If you had to compress it to one line: cathedrals were an attempt to build heaven’s architecture on earth, funded by a Church that had both the theological motive and the near-unlimited resources to actually attempt it.
From the cathedral, Münsterberg leads straight downhill onto Freie Strasse, Basel’s main shopping artery since Roman times. It’s a wide street still dotted with handsome guild houses and is now a place to spend lots of money, with major brands from Breitling and Cartier to Swatch and Lindt Chocolate. Luckily, Kim likes chocolate. Freie Strasse spills out at the north end into the Marktplatz, the medieval market square in front of the striking red Rathaus (town hall). We skipped the good local cheese, sausage, and Basel’s famous Läckerli spice cookies from the stalls there for lunch at Bohemia Basel.
That took us to train time and we caught the 2:07 to Zurich, which left with Swiss precision. That was our second use of our SwissRail Pass today. Precision and grandeur/scale seem like good artistic themes for our start to our Swiss sojourn.